. . . and sometimes I just want to give her a swift kick in the kiester.
This is purely LJ kind of stuff, so if it’s too M&P just let it sink like a rock. Normally I just let silly things like this go, but I’ve slept on this, and it’s still bugging me, so I kinda wanna hash it out and give it a good think. If you’d like to contribute to this process, I’d be interested in hearing your comments.
So I have this friend. Let’s call her Bossy Friend. Because she’s bossy. She likes to tell people what the should or shouldn’t be doing, and how they should and shouldn’t be acting. A lot. And she’s a hypocrite–though that’s phrasing it a bit strongly. For instance, she’ll tell someone to suck it up and quit whining about a trivial matter, only to be whining to beat the band about something equally triffling ten minutes later. She has a lot of great qualities. She’s smart, and generous, for instance. But for now it’s her Bossy characteristics that are getting on my nerves.
My husband, she and I were playing a game at games club. I was sick with a wee head cold, and had had a very busy stressful week. I wasn’t at my best, mentally or emotionally. The game finished. I won, mostly on luck in the last few rounds. Bossy Friend is usually a good loser, but maybe tonight she was annoyed at having lost. I don’t know. Anyway, I’ve been trying hard to stay hydrated because of my cold, especially because one of the symptoms is a dry, sore throat, and if I don’t have something to sip at I tend to start coughing. I needed to refill my water bottle, and the nearest water fountain was on the other end of the building, so I thought, “Aha, I will jaunt down and refill my water bottle while they clean up, so as not to delay the start of the next game.” So I stood and announced, “I’m going to go get water.”
Well, Bossy Friend immediately snapped, “Well, you can go get water if you want, but the game will still be here when you get back, because winner cleans up.”
I’m trying to understand exactly why I found this so damned annoying.
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I thought I was being considerate by running off to fill my bottle between games, instead of making everyone wait.
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If she thought I was being inconsiderate, she could have said, “Please help pick up before you go.” Saying, “The game will still be here when you get back” was childish and ridiculous.
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“Winner picks up” is nothing more than juvenile bullshit, most often declared by sore losers. The general etiquette is that all the players help. (And, indeed, if she had stood there and watched me pick up, I would have had words for her. But she helped pick up, too.)
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It’s not like I make a habit of skipping out on the clean-up phase. I don’t regard it as an unpleasant chore at all, and I think of the last, oh, say eight hundred board games I’ve played, I’ve helped pick up 798 of them. I resent being accused of intentionally trying to offload some onerous task on others.
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It’s not like I was walking away from a fucking crayon train game or something else that’s a pain to pick up. Picking up consisted of: Taking wooden pieces that were already sorted into neat piles by color and putting them in ziplocks, and picking up cardboard tiles, which do not need to be sorted, and dumping them in a box. It took about twenty seconds for me, Bossy Friend and my husband, to pick the game up.
I can think of several reasons why I shouldn’t be still fuming over this:
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Bossy Friend is Bossy Friend. She does this kind of shit, and you just put up with it, because otherwise she’s a fairly nice person.
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As per #5, it didn’t take long. I was delayed less than half a minute, got my water, life was good.
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As per #3, the other players had every right to expect my help picking up.
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If I was soooo fucking sick, I probably should have stayed home (except that wouldn’t have meant my husband couldn’t go to gaming, since he was my ride home.)
I guess what I really boils down to two things. One, it would have been nice for my friend, just this once, to give me a teeny tiny bit of help on a day that I wasn’t feeling well. Two, I really resent the tone she took and the way she chose to express herself. If I regularly tried to kite off without helping pick up, I’d deserve a sharp word, but I don’t. I might add that I’m sure if we really racked our memories, we might have come up with one or two cases when I picked up for her, since she has a habit of wanting to play in a new game that other people are starting up before the old one is finshed–and never once have I said, “Hey, stop playing that game and come back here and clean up!” because I don’t think it’s such a big fucking deal.
Okay, well, that helped a bit. If I’m totally out of line, and I need to adjust my attitude, lemme know. Otherwise, I think I’ll just file this in the “Forgiven” file and move on.
